Christ and people will. Not. Disengage. Game after game we get bogged down for ten minutes doing seaf artillery or some random bug nest and it turns in to a death spiral as people die, respawn, and run directly back in to the swarm, alone, without asking for or waiting for help, to get their damn railgun and rover and shield pack, and then they die again, and again, and it all goes to hell and none of them will ever just disengage. I try to gently coax them to move away from the fight and regroup, but i don’t have the authority to just give orders to randos, but god if they were an arma group that would actually listen to me i could get them all out of these stupid messes so we could get on with the game.

It’s the same problem i had in dnd, as a dm, where anything i put in front of some players, they decided it was there for them to kill, and that meant it was a level appropriate challenge and that they’d win. It drastically limited potential for storytelling.

And there’s this same murderhobo fixation. People don’t want to be a small special forces team doing hit and run raids. They think they’re playing halo or something, where they’re the invincible hero who always wins, and every enemy is hand placed for them to kill. They can’t cope with the idea of a game where enemies are there to kill you, and they have unlimited reinforcements, and the game design requires you to stay on the move, choose your battles, work with your team, get your objectives done, and gtfo.

I don’t think the vast majority of the player base has ever encountered a game like this before and they have no idea what to do with it. There’s constant complaints that “the guns feel weak” and then you pry in to it and people want a 12.7mm anti-materiel rifle to be able to pen tank armor, they want their assault rifle to kill giant 500kg armorered aliens in a few shots, it’s silly. It’s not that kind of game at all. They expect a borderlands style arcade horde shooter and when they get a weird mashup of hardcore tactical shooter, slapstick comedy, and b-movie sci fi they’re confused because it doesn’t behave like they expect it.

And then so many of them will not adapt. They know with absolute conviction, that they’re playing a normal horde shooter. So if the guns can’t effortlessly blow away hordes of enemies, if the mechanics require cooperation, if they have to weigh the strengths and limits of weapons when choosing their loadouts, the game must be wrong because they cannot possibly be wrong,because there’s “no wrong way to play” so if the game doesn’t let them win and win easily with any weapon they want to use it’s broken, bugged, badly designed.

I’m just upset about the whole thing. Helldivers one was this totally unique, fun, weird twin stick tactical shooter and there was nothing like it, but it never had a large following. Now hd2 has exploded in to one of the biggest games ever and trying to enjoy it is so frustrating because people don’t know how to play, they don’t know they don’t know, and because it’s apparently taboo to correct anyone or tell them that the game won’t indulge their whims and they need to play tactically they won’t learn, they refuse to learn, and a lot of people have been gaslighting me, like “the thing you know how to do and can do reliably anf tried to teach me how to do is impossible and you’re a liar and an asshole for claiming that it can be done” gaslighting.

I’m so fucking lonely, and a huge part of it is not having people in my life who see the world the way i see it, who understand things the way i understand them. I can’t enjoy this game that i love because assumptions and tactics and goals that are so natural to me are completely alien to others, and i can’t bridge the gap bc most people don’t know their is a gap, and wouldn’t want to cooperate anyway if they did. People have outright said that cooperation robs them of agency, that teamwork is a burden. So many of them want any complexity or challenge in the game stomped flat bc they’re frustrated the game doesn’t let them do everything by themselves and let them win.

I hate depression so much. I don’t want to live like this, where some silly game is so important to making the hours pass day after day, where i can’t really go out and be around people and touch grass and live a life. This shouldn’t be important to me but i barely have anything else so it is.

And i’ve always had this problem. I’m so team focused, so group focused. I think in terms of we, of us, of the community. And how does that go over in the hyperindividualistic, callous, selfish us society? Misery. Just misery. I don’t understand people and their motivations at all. Things that seem so simple and obvious are totally alien to others. “We’re stronger together, we should support and aid each other” and i just get blank stares sometimes. People seem to believe they can live a complete human life with just themselves and maybe a spouse and. Acat, cut off from everyone else in the world.